The summit between South Korea and the United States last week underscores the high anxiety Americans feel over North Korea’s nuclear weapons and missiles. Without fail, people I have just met confide how worried they are after learning that I worked at the U.S. State Department and took part in negotiations with the North.

I’m worried too — and it is primarily because of the flood of misinformation about North Korea. When you find yourself thinking about North Korea, please keep the following in mind.

A pre-emptive, unilateral U.S. military strike is not a solution. Simply put, a unilateral strike would put Seoul, South Korea’s capital — a city of 25 million people — at immediate risk. North Korea has thousands of artillery tubes, missiles, chemical and biological weapons — and, of course, nuclear weapons — at its disposal, and North Korea would not hesitate to use them. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, could die. South Korea is adamantly against unilateral military strikes. Indeed, the South’s consent would be essential for any military action and is unlikely unless the North attacks first.

The North Koreans are not crazy or suicidal. Despite how they are depicted in the popular press, the North’s leadership is savvy. The immediate proof is in the regime’s longevity — a third-generation family dynasty that has survived despite being its people being desperately poor (213 out of 230 countries in economic output) and an international pariah. There is little doubt that the North Korean regime has expertly played much stronger countries against each other to get what it wants.

The North Korean desire for a nuclear weapon is completely rational from its perspective. During my conversations with North Korean officials over the past 20 years, they regularly stated that if Yugoslavia’s Slobodan Milosevic, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi had had nuclear weapons, they would still be in power.

The real danger is a miscalculation, not a preemptive nuclear strike by North Korea.

Deterrence on the Korean Peninsula is alive and well. The North knows that it would cease to exist if it attacked the United States or its allies. The Kim regime’s core goal is survival, so a preemptive ballistic missile strike on the United States makes no sense.

But with a standing army of more than 1 million in North Korea and hundreds of thousands of South Korean and U.S. troops operating at a time of high tensions (exacerbated by the war of words and tweets between Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump), the Korean Peninsula is a tinderbox. A North Korean test missile that goes badly off course, an exchange of fire between North and South that kills a soldier, or a collision of naval vessels in contested fishing grounds — all of which have happened in the past —could push the peninsula rapidly into a catastrophic war that no one wants.

Regime collapse poses a greater risk to the U.S. and its allies. While regime collapse resolves one issue, it, unfortunately, leads to a more pressing one — that weapons-grade nuclear material could be smuggled out of North Korea. The North is estimated to have at least 25 nuclear weapons, likely scattered throughout the country. If the regime weakens, this would drastically increase incentives for stressed elites or rogue elements to sell nuclear material (something the size of a grapefruit) to the highest bidder.

Moreover, if the Kim regime were to fall, there would be a mad scramble to get these “loose nukes.” If nuclear material were secreted out of the country by the wrong people, a nuclear explosion in the United States, Western Europe or Israel could follow.

American policy toward North Korea has failed — this includes our attempts to subcontract the problem to China. To get us back on the right track, U.S. leaders must first understand the challenge. For too long, the United States has allowed caricature to drive policy. This inevitably leads us to one of three awful outcomes: North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles aimed at the U.S. mainland, the possibility of a nuclear attack by terrorists on U.S. soil, or a devastating war.

The only sane alternative is diplomacy — aimed at initially securing a freeze on the North’s nuclear weapons and missile activity and later a denuclearized Korean Peninsula. Time is short. We must act.

Philip W. Yun is executive director and chief operating officer of Ploughshares Fund, a San Francisco-based public foundation that seeks to reduce and eliminate the threat of nuclear weapons.